Can You Claim Something To Be A

You claim something to be true, knowing you can't prove it. What makes it different from a lie?

As a scientist I understand that I can never “prove” anything to be true. I can only make conjectures and test their predictions to determine if they are wrong.Although no number of failed refutations makes anything “true”, sometimes after a lot of attempts we get tired of trying, at which point a consensus forms that the conjecture is provisionally accepted as a “law of physics”. To call that “true” might be a lie; one never knows for sure.For instance, I start with the premise that there is a “real world” that behaves consistently according to simple rules that are not evident to us, but which we can learn about by trial and error. It doesn’t care what we think, what we believe, what we expect or what we want. I can’t prove that, but I haven’t heard a more palatable hypothesis yet.The lesson here is that some “lies” are better than others. If you’re looking for Absolute Truth, it’s in the same place as the Magic Wands.

Can you claim IPR over something you have created by copying Wikipedia?

If (and only if) you add content, or change content, such that your changes over the original are themselves copyrightable, then you have a derivative work based on Wikipedia content. I'm focusing on copyright because the cases where trademark or patent or whatever similar intellectual property rights would come into play either have obvious resolutions or are wildly unlikely.Most Wikipedia content falls under free licenses. All text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Images are licensed separately but are either freely licensed under similar licenses, in the public domain (copyright expired or waived), or used on Wikipedia without license under U.S. fair-use law, an exception to copyright. Check the license information for any image you use.You have a copyright in any derivative work you create. However, you must respect the licenses on the work(s) from which yours is derived, or else you're infringing copyright, which is not really helpful if you want to assert intellectual property rights.Most of Wikipedia's freely-licensed works use a "copyleft" clause, usually the "ShareAlike" in Creative Commons licenses. Those require you to license derivative works under the same license. Since doing so effectively waives most of your exclusive intellectual property rights, and you don't have those rights over the work you remixed, there's few meaningful ways to enforce them on your derivative work besides holding people to the license (which almost always also has an attribution clause requiring authors to be credited in reuse).Do check licenses, because if your work is only derivative of a work in the public domain (where copyright has expired or been waived) then you're not held to a copyleft clause and can exert all the intellectual property rights you want. Alternatively, if you use fair use media, then your derivative work might be an infringement itself in the first place, unless you can show that it meets fair use or fair dealing exceptions for your jurisdiction.(Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, etc.)

If you claim to know something, do you need to have evidence to back up your claim?

Yes.If you tell people you “know” something, it tells people that you understand that particular subject/topic well by heart. With evidence and proof that you know your stuff, people can actually trust you when you provide answers to their problems. People can trust you that you know what you are talking about and is not pretending to know the things that you claim. Usually, if you are able to provide your own examples of what you are trying to explain in your own words or through your own experiences, it tells people that you also know what you are talking about. Facts can be easy to memorize and repeat, but actually knowing how those facts came to be through your own words show whether or not you understand that particular subject/topic.Therefore, if you know something, you show it to people that you know through your experience, your own examples, and your own way of explaining that particular topic/subject so that people know they can trust you.Without evidence, people don’t know if they can trust you unless other people agree with you. Without evidence, there is a possibility of people asking you more questions about that particular subject/topic to verify that you know your stuff.

Is it illegal to claim something is "based on a true story" if it is not?

It may be unethical, misleading, and deceptive to claim that something is based on a true story when it is not. But, barring perjury, as has been pointed out, it's incorrect to characterize things as illegal when there's no specific law, regulation or rule that has been broken.  This is an English teacher's advice and requires no disclaimer because I am one..

Can you just claim something as being copyright protected or is there a formal process?

You cannot just claim something as being copyrighted protected. Initially, copyright is available only for original works of authorship that are fixed in a tangible form, whether published or unpublished - the text of a book, a photograph, etc.Assuming you have a “work,” the question is then when does copyright attach? The answer is copyright protection begins the moment a work is fixed in tangible form and lasts for the life of the author plus, generally, 70 years.In the United States, however, one needs to register the work with the Copyright Office before you can sue another party for infringing upon the work in question. If you do this within 90 days of the work becoming a tangible, fixed form, then you can obtain serious benefits under Copyright law such as a presumption your copyright is valid and statutory damages for infringements.

How do businesses claim to be the best at something or the favorite suppliers of something without breaking laws for being misleading?

In the US (and perhaps elsewhere) this is called "puffery," which is considered acceptable because people generally do not consider the claims literally true.Quoting Wikipedia (Puffery):In law, puffery is a promotional statement or claim that expresses subjective rather than objective views, which no "reasonable person" would take literally.[1] Puffery serves to "puff up" an exaggerated image of what is being described and is especially featured in testimonials.